Distractible - Dreams & Nightmares

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

The guys recount their night terrors, the first they remember and the ones that recur. Plus, they explore how memory relates to dreams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Good evening, gentle listener, and welcome to Distractible, a Wood Elf production with your hosts, Wondrous Wade, Byzantine Bob, and Magnetic Mark. This week, the Trigonorous Terrors debate Nocturnal Siren songs and sweaty sheets as they confront the gifts of Morpheus. Yes, it's time for Dreams and Nightmares. Please position thy dreamcatcher and enjoy the show. Welcome back to Distractible, starring me, your host. Wait, I got Mark and Bob here as well. Howdy, guys. Hello, hello, hello. Not starring, just here. Just some guy. Yeah, just a guest. Guest starring? Guest star. Starring me, the host. I'm guesting you two. Featuring? Featuring us? Featuring.

Yeah. That sounds more important than I'd like you to sound. And also us? Wade and friends? Wade and acquaintances. Oh my god, what a downgrade. Wade and former classmates. Well, you were never classmates with Bob.

Former schoolmates. We went to the same school. Oh, you were never classmates with Bob. Former schoolmates. We went to the same school. Oh, true, I guess. Yeah, we went to the same school at the same time. Former schoolmates. Brief moment in time, yes. Yeah. Did we graduate the same year, Bob?

I don't remember if we're the same age. I graduated. I took an extra quarter. Graduated in the winter of 2011 or something like that. That's still the same year. I never graduated. I dropped out. Lots of people graduated the same year as Mark. Yeah, man.

Yeah, thanks. That's one way to look at it. Children, babies, I don't know, people who aren't interested in college. I might go back. Do you guys ever miss college? Yes. I kind of do, actually. I don't miss being broke all the time, but I miss a lot of the rest of it. Yeah.

I never lived the college life. Not even the college life of like talking about partying or meeting people. Like I miss the structure. Just like having regimented things of like you go and your only job is to learn, right? And figure out how the hell you're going to pay for it. But you know, it is primarily just to learn learn things and that's kind of a fun atmosphere when you are actually interested in what you're

learning so i do miss that dude you know what i miss when i was in college the university of cincinnati had a beautiful rec center workout thing yeah beautiful facilities they had a pool multiple pools you could go use and when i was in school i was like i'm not trying to work out i'm trying to find out how i'm gonna afford my next case of beers and have fun with my friends like i'm trying to have i would fucking kill to have access to a beautiful olympic size lap pool and a huge recreation center with like running tracks and all these machines oh yeah that was so nice and i used it like a handful of times and then all the time i was in school let's all go back

next year let's go back to college let's go back to college guys yeah distractible goes to college that'll be our movie we'll do it for like a quarter a semester whatever they're on now we have to we have to live in a dorm room together our entire life is doing the podcast in the dorm room and then trying to survive yeah oh man they make tiktok houses and you know vine houses like we got to make a podcast house you know hey guys get on my podcast i just imagine all the like nerds from the npr politics podcast all living in like a big ridiculous la mansion yeah just like sitting around reading and like and did you hear about that uh new fiscal policy yeah no i read about that we'll see how that turns

out i don't think that's gonna be good for small businesses crazy house crazy house we have to get a dorm room we can't get a house we have to stay in one of their crappy dorm rooms like one of the tiny little dorm rooms yeah you're right i miss having just a shithole to live in when we were there and it was quarters why was it called quarters and not trimesters because summer quarter was also a quarter yeah with semesters there's still summer school yeah they i don't know why they translated to semesters like my last year that i would have graduated which really fucked up my ability to graduate in the first place because it also coincided with me being laid off from my co-op and i was like me not graduating is actually i should have graduated but like

well it's my body's fault like with my tumor and all that and then being laid off no it's their fault all right yeah you know it is you just had a little tumor come on they better provide us with another free four-year degree to make up for what they've done to you. Yeah, exactly. They. We're coming back. Yeah, you better watch out, UC. We're coming back. I'm getting my basket weaving degree.

No one's going to stop me. Did they offer a basket weaving degree at University of Cincinnati? I don't know. That's like the meme of what athletes get. They get basket weaving and business degrees and stuff. Yeah, that's like the meme. Dude, you know what class I wish I had taken? Mark, you remember outside our dorm freshman year they always had that repelling class because there was that big cement like staircase outside to the hall yeah it was mostly rotc people

yeah yeah yeah but like i would love to take a repelling class yeah i probably could have taught a repelling class because i made zero college friends wow i mean yeah yeah, that was another thing about the college experience, but basket weaving I just imagine there's a football player like college football like on the bench and the sidelines just frantically weaving a basket I got a this test. I got a Good time basket i gotta finish it good times good times i guess i should get us back on track here a little bit that's your show we're just guests college though i guess it can kind of segue into this because you know the reason people go to school go to college to pursue their dreams and ambitions and the theme i want to talk about today is dreams not necessarily goals but dreams you have while

you're asleep dreams and nightmares oh my god and uh any crazy stories you have you remember from any crazy dreams or nightmares you've had i feel like this could be a multi-parter so this is like we'll call this episode one of dreams and nightmares yeah this feels like the kind of uh episode where we're just like back and forth sharing dreams because i've got so many small instances there's nothing that could sprawl over a story but like i've got so many issues with uh dreams and sleep in general but yeah i feel targeted feel unfairly targeted i just want to start by saying that we have kind of talked about this before yeah but we've talked about the fact that i don't see visual images in my mind that spills over to dreams which spills over into dreams no way yeah i never made that connection

actually i never thought that would affect so do you Wait, talk about what this is in general. Okay, okay, okay. Well, this might change the entire direction of the episode, but we have. That's okay. We've had a discussion on like a live stream where we did, but I pose the question of what do you see if you're imagining something? If I tell you to imagine your childhood bedroom or something, apparently, and this was news to me, surprising.

Mark and Wade, you were both kind of like yeah i can see you know i see in my room you visualize it it's like you're standing in your room or laying in your bed or something right is that fair to say yeah i don't i don't see stuff on very rare occasion i it's not like i don't see anything it's just blackness in my mind when i'm trying to imagine or when i am dreaming but i don't see like distinct visuals of anything i can see like colors and suggestions of things from my memory or that i'm imagining mostly what i experience when i am imagining something or when i'm dreaming about things is like a feeling it's apparently a phenomenon known as aphantasia which basically just means i don't have like a very

visual imagination this is not a technical description, but this is sort of what we talked about previously. Yeah. So if I, listeners, gentle listeners out there, just as an experiment to get this kicked off, if we're going to talk about this,

try and imagine something really specific. Try and imagine, I don't know, your favorite memory, like your favorite birthday party or, you know, one of your best memories with your friends. Or an apple.

You can literally Google, imagine an apple in your head. And there's like a visual that goes along with it that shows like five different versions of what people can picture. Oh, it's in the Discord. I did put it in the Discord. Oh, it is. Yeah. So if you're trying to imagine and that's a good, a simple thing in apple. And like, think about what you see.

I see nothing. When I try to imagine an apple, I think of the flavors of my favorite apples, the sensation of eating an apple, biting through the skin, whether it's like waxy or kind of a softer flesh inside. Like I see, I see darkness in my head. If the image was available, I'm a five way on that, way on that end. Yeah. And for me, like if I, if you told me to imagine an apple like i can see a red apple and it kind of actually shifts if i don't concentrate i'll see an apple on a tree i'll see an apple in a basket i'll see an apple on a table like i'll pick up an apple in my imagination like i can rotate it fully yeah and bite it you can like i hear like a crunching noise at the side biting into an apple and then all of a sudden the apple in my hand has like a bite hole

in it i can see that so weird teeth marks in the apple i can see the browning lines from where your gaps in your teeth were when you've been in like i can picture all that do you feel the physical sensations to go with it or is it oh yeah like okay oh yeah as wade was saying that the the bite appeared the brown lines appeared in my visualization of it just him saying that almost forced me to see it i didn't try to see it it just happened you know what i mean that's weird yeah i can smell it i can feel it yeah i can all of that i think the strongest thing i have of an apple i left this out i hate when my hands are sticky but i love apples and when i eat an apple my hand my left hand always gets that like apple

juice stickiness and it drives me insane but i love apples that's like the strongest thing i get is i start like wiping my hand when i'm trying to imagine an apple because i'm like yeah but you know honestly i think this is more common than people know the inability i don't know if you call it an inability or whatever just like memory pushing more towards like the other senses that are not visual based like like touch, taste. It's not that Wade and I cannot experience that, but more primarily some people categorize their memories in terms of like the physical sensations of things and like the smell of it or the taste of it and that without like a visual record of it, like you can still have all the information you need. Like

people that are born blind and have never seen anything, they probably operate in a similar way and it's not like their brains are dysfunctional. It's like to experience those things, they don't need the visual side of it. So it's a fascinating look into just how the brain can adapt to different circumstances and contain the information that it needs to survive in ways other than just visually. I still think this is crazy. I mean, what's really interesting to me about it is it's relatively unstudied. I'm not an academic or anything. So maybe there are papers that I, you know, published papers in academia that talk about

this more. But if you just sort of Google this, what you find is, yes, aphantasia is a thing. And no one really knows what the hell's going on with that. There's not a lot of specific research. People don't still fully understand dreams either. I mean, a lot of things in the brain, like outside of the physical aspects of the brain and like what parts of the brain light up when you do different things, people don't really understand a lot about that. Just to bring it back to dreams, because I'm a very visual, imaginary person, like I express

my imagination almost purely through the visual side of things and audio, like visual and audio are kind of like the way that my imagination works things like touch and taste and smell aren't as prevalent or it's to the point where I don't really notice them unless they're specifically called out and so it helps me when I'm like say I'm making a video project it's kind of works very well because I can imagine what I need and then I can execute that same thing with practice like with drawing but when it comes to dreams that's where like things kind of shift I have a lot of nightmares a lot of the time and i pretty much have nightmares on the weekly basis like just last night i had a nightmare and usually my nightmares have shifted away from being things that are physically scary to things that make my brain think in ways that it's not

comfortable with you know what i mean like uh it's very difficult for me to describe but last night i had a nightmare quote unquote it was just like my consciousness was dodging, was trying to like swim through sludge to get to the surface. And like the way that my brain was trying to process information was kind of faulty. I call them like geometric nightmares because it's not based in anything that's reality. It's like my brain's trying to parse math equations that I could never understand. And it's all not in language basis, not image basis, just like a nest of different lines and things and physical sensations that are all happening at the same time. And it's like kind of my nightmares have evolved from being just pure visually scary to

this type of thing. And it's just like, I think my brain is just trying to reach a threshold of unsettling with my nightmares. It's like, yeah, we got to get the nightmare quote up. This ain't scaring him no more. Let's pump some cosmic horror in there. Let's get some fifth dimensional nightmares in here. Come on, back up the truck. So it's gotten to the point where I can't even describe what it is, but I know it's very unsettling and it's hard to wake up from.

That's interesting. Yeah. Abstract nightmares. Really? They don't happen too terribly often but it's been slightly more common than usual like it really it is just like my brain's trying to parse like you look at a room and you can see like okay i see the walls i can see generally how tall it is i can just generally how wide i can feel the room but in my dream it's like the lines of the room are all

wrong intersecting like the walls are close and far at the same time and there's just like this mathematical element to it and like i'm not great at math and it's just like my brain the background subconscious calculations that you do for like distance and spatial awareness are all trying to happen but they're all wrong so my brain is like oh this fucking sucks and then i get really like paranoid and i get really like kind of like a headache but in my dream it's weird and it's weird but those are exclusive to my nightmares not my normal dreams just my nightmares yeah I don't remember most of my normal dreams like sometimes I'll remember one briefly and I'll kind of forget it the last two dreams I remember are both nightmares one I went to bed after watching um I don't know

if you guys are familiar with the youtube channel cinema wins cinema sins yeah so I was watching I forget which one which channel it was but it was about the don't breathe the blind guy that has like someone in the basements like killing people in his house or whatever and uh i had a nightmare that combined like that with like michael myers halloween dead by daylight and i was in a house trying to escape from michael myers with other people who i can't even picture who else it was at this point but we were like trying to set up traps on our way of just trying to run and escape. And, you know, you peek around a corner, just be like, Michael, just do that thing where he steps out, whatever. And ultimately, whenever I woke up, I set a trap down and I turned to run and just like ran right into his chest.

And he reached out to grab me and I woke up. And then yesterday I was doing Grand Theft Auto RP and I actually incorporated my dream into the RP. Because the night before I had a nightmare where there was this creature creature it was like a cardboard box with legs and arms and it had three heads sitting on top and I remember one of the heads like some weird rectangular thing with almost like a robotic face and like it was I can't remember bits and pieces I can't remember the full scope of it but I know it reached out to grab at one point and then it went from being a box to like a gate like a brown gate and we had to run through it for some reason. And as we ran through it, these like metal spiky gate things dropped.

And it didn't make sense because they didn't just like impale. Somehow it decapitated whoever ran through it. Oh, weird. And that's when I woke up. Weird. But like I can visualize all of these things. It was like a gate. But in my brain, it also kind of shaped like a harp as the different spikes dropped.

It almost looks like a harp with spikes instead of strings. But I can visualize all this stuff from what my brain will let me remember. I can like hear the sounds. I don't really have any smell or touch memories from these particular ones. But like those are the reason that the topic even came up today is because like I remember these things. It's like, man, we never really talked about this stuff. But it never occurred to me, Bob, that you wouldn't have. I don't know if you don't dream.

I guess I'll ask you if you dream or have nightmares or whatever what what form those take that never even occurred to me that that would be a thing yeah i'm curious about that too yeah so i don't generally remember dreams like i could go for weeks without having a dream that i remember i don't know if it has to do with my quality of sleep i sometimes i don't sleep very well happens to me too i go long periods of time without remembering any of them. But I do have very vivid dreams that I do remember on rare occasions. I have like one nightmare that is always, my nightmare is always the same. And it usually comes if I'm just like really stressed or I don't know, stuff is really crazy. And it's more like an accumulation of feelings that I don't like all assaulting me at once. I have a lot of like

really specific things that like will make me cringe, will skeeve me out. And one that has always been a thing for me is walking and or running around the edge of a pool that's sort of like wet tile, you're wet and a little slippery going around the pool. The idea of like, ooh, if I slip, what if I hit my head on the edge of the pool and I fall going around the pool the idea of like oh if I slip what if I hit my head on the edge of the pool and I fall in there's a lot of like imagination that goes into this but I'm anytime I'm around the edge of a pool or I see people around the edge of a pool it makes me uneasy and that like I would say for my nightmare that recurs that's like the strongest feeling is that fear or whatever combined with being relentlessly pursued by something that I can't

see or perceive. So like my nightmare, I always remember it as the feeling of like, I'm running from room to room almost. I'm like going from pool to pool, but I always think like, okay, I'm getting away from the pool. And then I show up to another pool and I have that exact feeling of like, I got to go fast, but not too fast because I'm on the edge of the pool and it's really slippery. It's such a specific thing. And I'm not sure what exactly, like, I think I'm just generally afraid of whatever is causing me stress. Like it's always abstract.

I never see it. It's not a manifestation, but it's this feeling of like, it's coming. It's, I know it's coming. I can sense that it's coming and I have to go. Right, right, right. But like, there's no visual aspect to it it is entirely just feeling those negative emotions and i almost always i wake up with the feeling of like i fell fuck and i wake up with a jolt that thing where you feel

like you're you know yeah like inception like where you're falling and you wake up and you're like yeah that that is always how that goes how do you know you're by a pool then it's like the sensation like you know how especially like indoor pools you know it's always kind of humid in that specific way that like an indoor pool area is okay so your other senses are definitely in tune can you smell the pool water oh yeah a strong chlorine smell strong like pool smell and like the sounds even like you know that like echoey like kids at the pool and the distance and running and splashing it's everything except the visual except i would say the most visual i get is like it's like a very rough sketch maybe of like it's first person and i'm looking and i kind of see a pool and then I kind of see a doorway, but it's all dark and I can barely see anything.

But it's there's no strong visual. And the parts I remember are the feelings and the other. Yeah, like the smell. I always kind of feel like I smell chlorine, you know, for a while after I wake up. That's crazy. But yeah, I don't see anything. I don't imagine anything visual. And when I have positive dreams, they're zero percent visual. Weird. I don't know if that's when i have positive dreams they're zero percent visual weird

i don't know if that's because they're more light-hearted but like i'll have really specific positive dreams where i wake up and i'm like oh man i had a dream and you were there and we were on like a car ride we were going on a vacation or you know it's just like random positive fun stuff usually with like mandy my wife or with. But it's all emotional and it's all other senses, smells and sounds and things. That's crazy. I've always been visual from the very first nightmare that I remember. I don't even, this might be my first dream I ever remember is a nightmare. And it was when I was about four.

I might have told you guys this before, but if I didn't, I remember I was being chased by someone with a chainsaw in the woods like classic horror movie but I was four and I don't know when I would have seen a movie that had that kind of like imagery to it like I I don't recall seeing any movie about it I don't recall seeing anything about it but very distinctly this this guy their face like scary like huge chainsaw and I remember that and I woke up from it the most horrible part about is when i woke up from it i still saw his face like hanging over the foot of my bed like about where a very tall man would be looking at me and it didn't matter if i closed my

eyes or not because it was in my head obviously so I would see it I'd close my eyes and I'd still see him and he was right there and it was like no matter I opened my eyes he was there and I closed my eyes and he was just right there there was nothing else in the black void but just him don't like that it burned into my brain like I remember that just as vividly now as I do back then and I was terrified obviously because I was a kid and it was just like this horrible man. But the thing is, his face was the only thing that was there. There was no body. It was no chainsaw, just a floating head.

And I don't know if that made it worse, but like thinking about it, just like, ah, excuse me, I put my head on the covers, didn't matter, still saw him. It took a long time for that image to fade away. But, oh, my first memory of a dream is just like that fucking face. I kind of have one of those.

It's not, well, I don't remember a lot from my childhood anyway, which is the thing I want to talk about in a minute. But I had a similar experience. My dad had a big, like, classic sci-fi book collection. He liked sci-fi. He had a lot of, like, Heinlein and all the Ayn Rand books. And, you know, just like a collection of books from, like, when he was in college. All yellowed and old and musty smelling and when i was a kid i went through phases where i would just like go into the bookcase and grab up some of these books and i don't remember what the book

was called but one of them was about fourth dimensional aliens that could go in and out of like our dimension weird but essentially were invisible they could travel around in this other dimension and we couldn't perceive them but then they could come into our dimension and do stuff to us and they were like abducting people and doing things i read that book and it was super cool i love sci-fi but then i remember a couple times i was sleeping in my bed as a kid and i had this dream of like oh my god the aliens are here i can't see them oh wow here and i went from sleeping and dream like having a kid. And I had this dream of like, oh my God, the aliens are here. I can't see them, but they're here. And I went from sleeping and having a nightmare about that

to being awake in my bed in the middle of the night, just like, what do I do? They're here. They're just in there in the other dimension and they'll just pop in and they're gonna do stuff. Like super way too excited, way too real about this idea that these fourth dimensional aliens

were just gonna like pop into existence and there was nothing i could do about it which is convenient because didn't require me to envision anything it was just me in my empty room seeing nothing but it like something about my childhood brain i lost my shit and it was a very vivid memory of like absolute terror for a couple hours before i got so tired i fell back asleep multiple times i wish i remember what that book was called because it was pretty cool a classic sci-fi thing but yeah i guess to throw my ring in the hat with the first one i remember in the hat my hat in the ring you know you throw a ring in the hat yeah you throw the ring in the hat the hat in the ring you put the

ring in the hat yeah well you can have a hat and you throw it in a ring but if you have a smaller ring you throw it in the hat throw it in the hat but then what happens you would throw a ring in the hat and you had the ring well then get a ring in the ring hat it's like putting a rabbit in a hat you might have to put a rabbit in the hat to pull a rabbit out of the hat you know yeah you what if you put a ring on the rabbit in the hat and you pull that out which do you put out the ring of the rabbit uh depends what if the rabbit's wearing the ring that's what i just said the ring was on the rabbit the rabbit was wearing a ring then i guess you pull out both but which one goes first uh i guess depends what part of the if you're grabbing the

rabbit by the ears where's the rabbit wearing the ring you got me there deduct points from myself are there points there's been a few i've just they're silent points oh right we knew points okay okay okay we have silent points i forgot about that part of this i thought we're just talking i just remembered it and i've started retroactively thinking about points all right good the retroactive points that may or may not have existed are now removed so it's kind of Schrodinger's points at this point. Yes. All right, I'm going to throw my rabbit at the ring. Toss your ring, buddy.

One of the first dream nightmares I remember is my grandparents had this tri-level house. So you'd walk in and to the right, there was a staircase that led down like half a level. You know, you guys know how tri-levels are set up, right? Three levels, right? Yeah. Well, they had a tri-level with a basement. So it was three floors and then also a basement so you'd walk in and right in front of you there was a door that led to the kitchen to the left was like a living room and then like the dining room connected

there was a staircase that led down to like the lower level the tri-level then past that there was a staircase that led up to the upstairs where there were a few bedrooms bathroom whatever so my grandparents always hosted holidays christmas thanksgiving, Easter. We'd come together and there'd be like anywhere from like 20, 30, maybe even 40 people in their house for these events. It wasn't like a huge house, so it was kind of compact. Typically, the adults hang out on the main floor. Kids were hanging out downstairs. All of this is relevant because in the dream, we were at a holiday get together and the kids were hanging out downstairs on the lower level, the tri level. And the adults were doing whatever on the main level, cooking food out chit-chatting sometimes they'd play like poker or

something and uh all of a sudden this green gas started pumping into the house and we would hear like these horrible screams from upstairs and all of a sudden like all the kids except for my cousin disappeared and it was my cousin and i and she and I like creeped up the stairs. We had to have been like five or six years old. And we looked and all of the adults were turning into the witch from like Wizard of Oz. They were all looking like the green witch from Wizard of Oz, like hat, green, big nose, everything. This gas was turning them all into witches.

Weird. And so in the tri-level, the lower level, there was windows that you could see outside, but the windows set almost right on the ground. And then there was like the wall that was basically underground and the wall all of a sudden had a hole in it and my cousin and i crawled into this hole and just tried to scurry back and i don't know which relative it was because they all looked the same they came down and they started reaching and their arm no matter how far we scurried back their arm just kind of kept stretching like penny

wise and uh it whenever he grabs georgie and his arms just keep stretching out their arm just kept stretching closer and closer and then like they blew the air and this green smoke started coming toward us and right before their hand and the green smoke touched us i woke up that's weird but that dream for some reason has stuck with me for 15 no 25 26 Wow. I remember that dream for that long. I don't know why. It's just still there. Yeah, man. I have occasional dreams like that.

There's one, man, it's like a half waking nightmare, half just pure nightmare. But it probably is the one that scared me the most, just because it made me feel like I was about to die. I was at my mom's house, and I remember my bed had a window by it, but it wasn't even a window that I could see through. It was like I'd have to lean up to see through it. But I remember in my dream, I was looking out the window at some point. I don't remember what happened before, but I was lying in my bed, looking out this window in my dream as if it was a normal room, as if it was just the room I was normally in. And out this window, the moon was literally

crashing into the ground. Full-on Majora's Mask style. It didn't have the big face or anything, but it was crashing into the ground. And in my brain, I was just like, oh, oh, oh shit, this is it. Like, I'm about to fucking die. You could see the ground,

like, kind of like tidal wave towards me. Just this big shock wave. It hit. Big fire blast. And just before it was, actually, not just before it was about to hit, it was like coming over the tree line, this big wave of energy, and then I woke up, but I woke up looking at the exact same thing, right, and this is impossible because the windowsill isn't at the

level where my eye would be, but I woke up, quote unquote, and I was looking out this window still lying down, and there was no moon, and then I blinkeded and i was back in the dream and the the wave of uh wave of like just dirt and like ground was closer and i'd be like oh and then i blinked and it was gone again and i was awake quote unquote and then i blinked and it was coming even closer like it still kept going like in between his blinks and this took in the space of like 10 seconds wow and it was like blink it was gone blink was there and i was like i swore i was awake but then i finally woke up because i blinked one last time and like it reached me and then i was like yeah and then i woke up in my bed i was looking at the ceiling and i'm like what what the fuck like what the fuck like and i've had those dreams where in my sleep i

am in my room as it normally is but i am looking in a different direction that i could not possibly see this is very very strange weird yeah not the different direction that I could not possibly see. This is very, very strange. Yeah, not the only time that's happened either. I have plenty of those waking nightmare things. But maybe we could talk about good dreams too, I guess. Well, so I had kind of a spinoff topic, I guess I'm curious about, more on the Aphantasia train.

Oh, go for it, you know it. So apparently people are beginning to study this more because there was apparently a study in 2020 as well as a study in 2021 but the 2020 study i'm summarizing possibly inaccurately but this is what i'm getting from the internet they concluded one of their conclusions was that people with aphantasia have less vivid autobiographical memories or have trouble retaining autobiographical memories at all autobiographical meaning about your own life yeah i have always felt weird because i feel like i don't remember a lot of important and like big things from my life like i remember them like i

heard about it once i know that these things happened or that i did these things but i'm just curious i guess how how many memories do you feel like you have of like your childhood? Like, do you remember your third grade class, the classroom? Do you remember anything? Cause I feel like I got nothing. If you bring it up. Yes. The moment you mentioned third grade, I pictured my teacher.

Yeah. It really depends. It's like random access memory is good. Like, uh, like sequential read is bad. You know what I mean? Interesting. But like, so if I was like, okay, just because I said it, what can you remember about third grade?

Like the school part of third grade, teacher, classmates, the school you were at, events that happened, field trips, anything. I cannot separate first, second, and third grade at all. If you asked me to pick what happened in what year, I would not be able to tell you. And that kind of spills over to other years as well. Like junior high, between seventh and eighth grades, I couldn't tell you what was in seven and what was in eight. High school, I could barely distinguish between what was freshman year and what was senior

year. It's weird you mentioned third grade because of all the grades. Third is the one I have no like specific memories of. Second grade, i switched schools and i remember uh being laughed at because i had a backpack at this new school like one of my first days i came with a backpack full of like dinosaur toys everyone's like you brought toys to school i was like yeah i brought my dinosaur toys and uh i met some of my friends that i still know today in second grade it was a new school so like i didn't know anybody starting off i remember like

forgetting my homework and there was a girl that like helped me one day because i'd forgotten to do it i have specific members from second grade fourth grade i remember our teacher gave us the wrong test i remember saying they're taking a history test and sweating bullets because i was failing it miserably and i was like i don't know any of this information and we all were like sweating one kid got a 98. everyone else got a 60 or worse and the teacher was like i am so sorry that is a test that was meant to come out like in a couple months we haven't studied that subject matter yet and i remember having that conversation i remember another science teacher coming over we had a different teacher for science versus like the other subject whatever fifth grade i remember our teacher

reading us the first harry potter book like i've got specific memories from those years third grade i've got nothing but only third grade kind of first grade too actually first grade i don't have memories of either okay well that makes me feel less weird i feel like i can't remember anything like even if i tried really desperately to describe my third grade or like my elementary school i went to a different one for fifth grade year because we got re like districted or whatever i can't remember what they looked like i don't think i can remember maybe one teacher's name mrs woodson or something like that but like i've always felt like other people recall things from their life and maybe that's too far back but even college for me a lot of it's a blur a lot of it is

memories with you mark not a lot of it but like parts i liked generally involved you because it was like things with friends or whatever or freshman year was a big thing it, but like parts I liked generally involved you because it was like things with friends or whatever, or freshman year was a big thing. It's very fuzzy. And I've always wondered if it was because I can't visually remember it, or I guess people just don't have that great of memory. Maybe I've just been selling myself short. No, I think it's just kind of just people's memories are never as good as people think

they are. I kind of have a habit in my life of just like, if you think you're good at something, talking to myself, just like kind of doubt it, like doubt that you're the best in the world. Because like, you know, always kind of like undersell things like memory, because it's like, it's probably not as good as you think it is. So that kind of saves me because my memory is not very good. But about random things, like events in my life. Like I said, just like all of my childhood kind of just blurs in one big lump junior high. I couldn't tell you what happened there. I don't remember a single teacher's name, like, especially in, uh, in high school. Like I

don't remember any teacher's names besides Mr. French. I remember Mr. French, everyone else. I don't remember. I literally could not remember if you showed me a face, I might recognize it, but I could not tell you what the me a face i might recognize it but i could not tell you what the hell happened in those classes that i was there and i spent four years of my life in high school i said junior high i spent four years in junior high it was a two-year junior high for the record couldn't remember a goddamn thing especially the educational stuff like i don't know i remember seventh grade i do remember i think miss kelsey was teacher's name. I was in her classroom whenever 9-11 happened. Oh, I do remember.

Yeah. That. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember watching Channel One or whatever it was called. I remember seeing, you know, the news. I remember coming home. Like, I remember that very specifically from seventh grade. I remember, like, dating.

Yeah, yeah. In eighth grade and stuff. I remember going to Kings Island between seventh and eighth grade and my friend having a crush on a girl. And then she ended up like sitting with me instead and he was like really mad at me you know I had nothing to do with it hey remember weird specific moments like that oh man it's all such a blur it's such a blur and I kind of like hate it because like it's a good thing about having a YouTube channel

is because I have documented proof of things that I did at a certain time stamp like so I can go back to a video that I've made and I can watch it and I can be like, oh yeah, I remember what happened on this day because I have a reference of it and I can see it. And that's such a cool thing because it's the same thing about having a diary, right? You have a diary because it can translate what's in your brain down to paper.

And I'm not sure, I'm about to recite some science that I can't remember where I read it. So everyone take this with a grain of salt. But I remember reading something about how humans traded off the ability to have better instantaneous short-term memory or like even photographic memory. Like there's some evidence that shows pretty much all other creatures that have good memories, like say chimps or monkeys or something like that. They have photographic memory and excellent short-term memory. And that's because we traded off those abilities for writing and the ability to look at any piece of writing in a language that we know and read or understand

language processing that section of the brain was previously like our photographic memory portions of it and the ability to write down our thoughts and record things for longer than our memory could retain them is our trade-off for losing some of those like specificity of like the photographic memories and things like that. So I don't know where I read that. That might all be bullshit. So everyone take that with a grain of salt. or at least tell someone about and tell a story and then be able to retain those words or recognize words or be able to exchange information between one person to another, whether it's through writing or through like just speaking them directly. So like a big portion of our brain

just like is about that and not about the other things that were essential for survival before writing came along. I also feel like it's almost like a filing cabinet where I can't recall a lot of memories. Like I feel like I've got no no memories but i'll bet you if someone mentions something one of their memories of third grade all of a sudden i would probably have some recollection of that event if it was described specifically i mean oh yeah i'd forgotten about that yeah there's a lot of times where i can't bring a memory up but something else will trigger it and all of a sudden it'll come back even though i couldn't access it willingly on my own something else will just bring a memory back that i hadn't thought about in a decade or more yeah no same with me like if you tell me about a certain situation that i was definitely an

inactive in like and you told me about it i would never be able to recall that on my own but instantaneously i would be back at that point and in a weird way i would be able to visualize it like and maybe that's a tough part about like having visual memories because when you have to try to conjure up the visual your imagination is trying to rebuild the thing you're trying to remember until you get the actual source of it so it's like maybe it's like more destructive in in that regards because and that's why it's hard to remember things that happened is because to conjure it how do you even start from getting that image like where in the filing cabinet is that picture you have to rebuild it just to be like what am i thinking about okay it had like a dog in it and then like greg was there and then like oh yeah there was a we were at a park and you rebuild that in your

head and you're trying to like approximate and then your recognition is like oh yeah no it wasn't a park we were in the lunchroom but it's like you know then you just destroyed that memory with there's a park in there so i don't know memory's weird man it is all right i have a follow-up question because now i'm just sort of thinking about this back to dreams so we're not scientists i doubt anyone out there listening needs that to be said out loud but like i'm sure there are neurological studies and psychological studies and all kinds of scientists of all types who have spent time and are currently investigating what they think dreams are what the evidence suggests but i guess i'm curious since we're talking about them what do you guys think dreams are they're very different

experiences i mean we've talked about how mine are not very visual and yours are extremely visual mark and wade you're just sort of in the middle or whatever you're normal normal guy but like what do you where do you think they come from because i can say with confidence when i have had nightmares at least nightmares that i remember it's always during tumultuous times it's always at a point where i'm incredibly stressed like i was when i was in law school very stressful hard work long hours or you know other times where huge things are happening like the tour was turned out to be really fun but it was stressful for me ahead of time because i didn't know how that was going to go for context for anyone who doesn't know we did a live show tour

many years ago now it's like a comedy show and we had never done that before and it turned out super fun but like that seems obvious to me but the rest of them why do you have a good dream why do you have a dream that doesn't make any sense but isn't good or bad i don't know what do you guys think i have a theory uh way do you want to go first though because i could go well so just in general it depends one of the more recent nightmares i had like i said i watched a cinema sin cinema wins video and then all of a sudden my dream incorporated that into it and then added some other just random horror aspects to it when my grandma passed away we were uh i think juniors in high school and i had this dream it was like a recurring dream for a couple months that would have every now and

then where my dad had passed away before sixth grade my grandma passed away in junior high and i'd lost a couple other people but i had this dream that i was on a beach and there was um oh god what are the like the white tent things that sit on like the poles cabana yeah there was like one of those uh there's like a table underneath and my dad my grandma were sitting there i think my aunt there's a couple of people that were sitting there a couple of people that were there that were still alive most of them had passed on they were just sitting there laughing and talking and uh like looked up and smiled at me as i walked up to them and like i clung to that i clung hard to that dream and i had it a few different times from a few different angles or

a few different things would happen or whatever but But it was always like the same location, the same level of wind blowing. But I was in heavy grieving at that point. And my dream kind of reflected that. Now, whenever you have a dream that doesn't seem to have any basis in reality, like the weird box gate monster or, you know, stuff like I don't know. Sometimes I feel like your brain just incorporates different crap throughout the day and just kind of like spits it out in a weird way to recycle it or move it on. Sometimes I feel like maybe my brains, I'm having a hard time going to sleep. My brain just got a lot going through it. And then maybe that'll be a night I dream a lot more.

I don't know. Cause I normally forget most of my dreams. It's very rare that I wake up and remember one, but usually the ones that at least I remember have some basis in some event or something I've seen or heard or talked about that then shows back up in my dream in a weird way. That's interesting. My philosophy for dreams is probably a little unorthodox, or maybe some people have it. But at the end of the day, I look at a dream and I'm like, it doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't really matter

why it happens. Or it doesn't really matter like what the conclusion of it is. Because whenever I run into a problem where the answer is all internal and all just like it happens it's a bit like a basis of human experience it's not so much I'm dismissive like oh it doesn't matter like the waste of time it's moreover just like whatever conclusion I come to I cannot verifiably prove especially when it's something that is a human experience but also a personal experience so the answer really wouldn't affect me and dwelling on it might cause more harm than good. Because if I if I look into why I have nightmares on the weekly basis, if I start to question that why, like that would run me down a path of looking at like, okay, well, what's going wrong with my life? And maybe that's healthy.

But it probably the end of the day, it's not because I function just well by being like, I have nightmares on occasion. And whenever I tell some people that they're like, Oh, no, well, are you changed something? I was like, No, I just just got used to it. Like it doesn't it doesn't bother me at all. But moreover, just like what dreams are. I think if if if I look at that question, I have to just like think about okay, well, what is sleep, right?

Because it's it's what causes dreams. And if I think about it, logically, it's probably just your brain has to clean up itself during sleep. There's a lot of things that happen to the human body with like cleaning up, you know, junk from your brain, like waste products, reforming memories, you know, solidifying connections of the previous day, repairing stuff, there's a lot of immune system things that happen during sleep. So like your body's going through a lot of things, there's probably a lot of chemicals that like have to be shunted around to make it happen. So if I think about it logically, like you're not dead, you're still kind of alive. So

your brain's kind of semi conscious, because it's not going to put itself completely out, your brain goes through different parts of itself to fix itself. It's probably just like the way memories are recorded is just like whatever path the connection takes in your brain between the neurons. And there's almost like an uncountable number of possible connections that could happen. So it's probably just as it goes to a certain section, it triggers certain memories. And sometimes they're related to things that are being formed permanently in the day before, sometimes not. So I think it's just all just random gobbledygook of your previous day, like, or old memories get dredged up depending on where your brain is like, oh, this part is getting a little scruffy.

Let's clean this part off here. All right, that looks good. This part over here. Yeah, that looks good. I don't know. I think that's probably the what it is, but more the why I don't bother thinking about. What creatures, like, do amoebas sleep? At what level do creatures start like

sleeping oh weird is like creatures that have a very obvious like brain and stuff does like everything sleep or does it get to a certain point where some organisms do and some don't i don't know if we know the answer to that i'm just very curious i think that probably depends on what the like technical definition of sleep actually is yeah because as we think about it it's the idea of like you know it's you rest physically tired you're also you're mentally tired it's like most organisms cannot function constantly but i would imagine that that applies to you know simpler organisms because for humans that means laying in bed and sleep for animals that means find a bed find your nest find your den i don't know

whatever animals might do but for multicellular or simpler organisms i mean that's us multi-cell whatever for simple organisms they must have down times right oh i think so where regenerative functions or cleaning like you were talking about mark like chemical you know rebalancing or or getting rid of waste or whatever like has to happen it's not necessarily sleep and i don't think you could dream without a complex brain like i'd be curious we ever have any technology that would let us know what an animal dreams about or if an animal dreams or whatever i would think they do i mean have you ever seen like a dog kicking and whining in its sleep or like yeah licking or or whatever? Like it's got a bone.

But like the cyclical nature of like you can't always be operating at 100%. That's got to apply to simpler organisms. I have to imagine, but I don't know. Okay, this is strange because I just looked up whether amoebas sleep. And there is research that says that even like jellyfish, which don't have a brain, and nematodes, which I believe are, those are single cell organisms. No, maybe not. I don't know.

But they're like these things that don't necessarily have a brain still go into a state of rest. Like what you said, Bob, they go into sleep like states. And so it's really just a matter of like, okay, sleep is absolutely universal, but maybe it's just because everything needs a break every once in a while unless i think there's probably a threshold of like a creature that lives not long enough to need sleep like a seven day life maybe they just fucking go until they die like uh they wouldn't need sleep because they don't need to recover because they're like flies sleep because they don't live for that long yeah it's it's a question

but it's universal. Like apparently scientists have not found any animal, like animal animal that does not need sleep, even if it's a little bit, even if it's a lot like need sleep. And I think it's just because no matter what, there are certain chemical energy requirements that you need to be awake. And there are certain bodily functions that need to occur to maintain biological integrity that can only happen when you are not moving and not using that big dumb brain i think it's just like a matter of there needs to be a reset there needs to be recovery there needs to be recuperation like it just happens so fascinating yeah i can't see a fly sleep do fly sleep they need a comfortable

place to sleep that will shadow them. What? Yeah, I found an article that's like for like children, but it basically says flies do sleep. They have a central nervous system and they also have circadian behaviors, meaning that they have demonstrated that they have like a pattern of sleeping and waking up with consistency, which is interesting. Weird. Weird.

Do you think they dream? Oh, I don't like it. I don't like it i don't like it i can't imagine just a big old poopoo platter i mean so this is it's very human of me but to answer my own question i kind of generally agree with you i guess mark on the same train yeah i feel like and this is coming from mandy my wife mandy i really think dreams are more active than people might think. I don't think you go to sleep and your brain just does whatever it wants and dreams come up because Mandy can go to sleep and maybe she forgot to set her alarm or she set her alarm for PM or AM or her phone dies or whatever. She wouldn't do that. But if she did, she could still wake herself up in time for like, you know, work for a

meeting or something that she knows that she has. Yeah. She is like still conscious while she's asleep. She has absolutely like had a long day, been exhausted, gone to bed and forgot that there was like an early thing the next day with no alarm or anything, woken herself up like half an hour before the thing and just been like, I have to get ready and go to this. Oh, yeah. And like, so I think that, you know, it's not the same as being awake and conscious. Yeah, there's some level of like consciousness, obviously, that still happens

while you're asleep. And I think dreams come from that, which is why, you know, nightmares, in general, I feel like it's fair to say spawn from bad days or from stressful times or as a result of grief. Like, you know, you're, you're worried about something, you're afraid of something. I think whatever you're experiencing during the day sort of carries over. And it's like, you know, like you said, Mark, it's like processing, converting your short term memories into long term or dealing with and trying to clear like the cache of what's in your mind from the day. I have no idea how that might work because I know even less about brains

than neurologists do. And they don't know that much at this point about how the details of everything works. But like, it just seems like it comes from consciousness. It's just so driven by the day. But like you said, Mark, it's also abstract

because it's uncontrolled, right? When you're conscious and you're thinking about something, if you're afraid of something or stressed, you're thinking about it and you might have a unrealistic fear or you might have an abstract fear, but you are at least awake and guiding that enough to be like, okay, well, that is scary, but I'm not going to let that, you know, spin out of control. I'm not going to focus on that. I'm going to keep focusing on what I can control. Yeah. Keep working or, you know,

try to fix this or whatever. But when you're asleep, you're not controlling that. And so stuff spins out of control on its own. Something that might not dominate your consciousness while you're awake becomes a crazy ass dream or something that you're interested in that you're thinking about critically while you're awake becomes this weird, fascinating, abstract thing that you dream about that's super exhilarating.

Like, I feel like it comes from that. But the technical details of that, someone should really figure that shit out. Yeah yeah and there's definitely like a whole category that we haven't touched on which is lucid dreaming and that's something that i have only had a few experience of it but i've also never tried to actively achieve lucid dreaming because it's also something that i look at and i'm like it sounds fun and I get that, but I always am wary of things like that that affect the very important function of sleeping and also getting lost in a dream world is never something that I'm very particularly interested in.

Whenever I've started to gain control of dreams, I've typically realized that I'm dreaming and then I'll wake up. Yeah, yeah. Almost always for me. But as much as I would love to continue this thread, I feel like I should probably wrap us up here soon. We've kind of gone gone on this was like a more serious episode but i really enjoyed it i enjoyed delving into the brains and our brains and looking at all this stuff i found it very interesting i hope you guys did too i did that's pretty neat very interesting

yeah well i think that we have very different experiences especially compared to you bob and not seeing things but i think like all of our dream experiences and the input we had is valid and uh therefore i declare this a tie all right what wait the first tie of distractible what does that even mean and do we all have to host next episode it means you two have to you two have to joint host oh god joint host or you guys can fight to the death uh i won't fight to the death that no no okay all right hey come on all right let's fight to the death i guess no i don't want to do that oh we don't i thought you just said you do want to fight to the death no i don't want to fight to

then one of us would be dead all right fair enough that's true i don't even know who it would be kind of a weird matchup you could fight to the yield all right fine fight to the not death or i could just pick a winner if you guys don't want to join host. No, no, we'll join host. No, we'll join host. You already said it. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out.

Yeah, yeah. Hell yeah. All right. Well, thank you, Mark and Bob. I appreciate your guys' input. I think dreaming is a very fascinating thing. Something I looked at when I took a psychology class in high school. I talked about dreaming a lot with the teacher.

Hopefully, all you guys out there listening, you know, share your experiences with us too, whether it's social media, whatever have you. Hopefully it was interesting for all of you guys. Thank you all so much for listening to Distractible. Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast on every platform it's on. Download and listen to it every episode, multiple times. Check out our sponsors. Subscribe to Wood Elf so you always know when there's a new episode and follow Wood Elf Media for the latest updates. You can also follow our socials we're on youtube and facebook and twitch and that kind of thing yeah thank you guys thank you bye podcast out